Three-time Emmy winning correspondent Ann Curry, BA '78, addresses SOJC students during a recent trip back to campus
President Trump is ending child support payments after 2017.
A mosque in Houston refused to provide shelter to non-Muslims after Hurricane Harvey.
CNN staged a rescue video during the same hurricane.
The NBC comedy The Office is returning to television.
What do all of these stories have in common? They’re all false (sorry, Jim and Pam fans), but were widely reported on the internet throughout September. Yes, they're all fake news.
“Fake news” became a popular term in the lead-up to the 2016 election, used originally to describe misleading articles that appeared on social media, but later to dismiss media coverage that was simply unflattering. The fact-checking website Snopes uploaded 30 stories to its “Fake News” category in September 2017 alone, including all four examples listed above. President Trump sent 12 Tweets complaining about “fake news” during the same month, including a claim the New York Times had apologized for its coverage of him (it hadn’t, making that “fake news” Tweet fake news about a real news outlet).
With so much misinformation readily available, and news sources becoming viewed as partisan rather than informative, trust in the media may be the lowest it has ever been.
According to Gallup, the number of Americans who trust the media peaked in 1976, after Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein broke the Watergate story—a scandal that inspired a generation of journalists to seek the truth with zeal. However, a 2016 Gallup poll found that only 32 percent of participants possessed a “great deal” or “fair amount” of confidence in the media; Gallup began asking Americans how much they trust the media in 1972, and since 1976 the percentage of people who gave positive answers has slowly decreased.
But despite the public’s cynicism, UO instructor Mark Blaine doesn’t see the profession disappearing anytime soon. Rather, he views the fake news debate as even more well-positioned than Watergate to motivate the next generation of reporters. Students generally take it as a challenge, he said, and the number of students enrolling in the School of Journalism and Communications has increased.
“Choosing to be a journalist is choosing a path,” he said. “These people are enthusiastic and want to do great things. With the best of them, you can see them dipping their toe in those great things.”
In an era when the public is becoming increasingly hostile toward the media—in September, the BBC hired security guards to protect one of its own reporters following threats she received, and just this past week the vice president of programs for Gallatin County Republican Women in Montana said she would’ve shot the reporter state representative Greg Gianforte body slammed in May—it is imperative for journalists to get it right. The first step for the UO’s future journalists is to think critically, and value accuracy and fairness. A current topics course, named Issues in Communication Studies: Fact or Fiction, teaches students to be critical of the news sources they consume by crosschecking information, using non partisan sites, and checking their own biases.
But beyond simply getting details correct, one modern struggle is keeping up with a rapidly changing and cynical world in which social media is a 24-hour news outlet that aids the saying, “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes” (which, in an act of actual fake news, is a quote often misattributed to Mark Twain). Old news values, such as timeliness or conflict, are easy to teach as a hard science but are more difficult in practice. Therefore, it is important to evolve.
Associate Professor Nicole Dahmen and two of her colleagues recently launched the Catalyst Journalism Project, which “brings together teaching and research with the goal of reaffirming the value of the news media in the post-truth age by combining investigative journalism with the innovative practice of solutions journalism.”
Solutions journalism is rigorous reporting about responses to social problems, and initial research suggests that audiences are more engaged, enthusiastic, and willing to trust reporting that contains a possible solution instead of simply reporting a problem. The Catalyst Project prepares journalism students to take an active role as watchdogs and produce insightful, factual stories that detail responses to some of the more vexing issues facing our communities.
So while conspiracy theories and disregard for the truth will always be present online, the UO is preparing its future Ann Currys to be critical of sources and free of bias as they expose abuses of power and offer solutions to real-world problems.
And that’s real news that deserves to be shared, liked, retweeted, and forwarded worldwide.
- Abby Keep
University of Oregon student